the real question is how silly a name for a coffee drink you can come up with. On the other hand, in the dead of winter in Edmonton, various forms of high octane caffeine are often the only things that get you going...

from which one gets great views of the rooftops and chimney pots of Paris... from the Charles de Gaulle museum. I have some other more artistic shots through some kind of mobile like thing in a window, but this one is more representational of what I wanted to show.

April 2008. I had a conference-- not a great conference, but it was in Paris. I've never really liked Paris before. I've been there a few times. Usually I get sore feet and get to see a lot of quite grey buildings, all somewhat block-like, and stand around thinking, do I really want to stand in that line? Do I really want to try to eat at that bistro where the wait staff will sneer at my pathetic attempts to recall high school French? This time, I went to my meetings, dutifully, and ate uninteresting sandwiches, while Matt went trotting around Paris having a good time without anyone being rude to him because he speaks no French at all and doesn't even try. After my meeting was over, uneventfully other than my pissing off a lot of important people, I joined Matt in his trots around Paris and had a really good time. His friends Vincent and Pamela met us one day and took us up to a cathedral high on the hillside where you get great views of Paris rooftops and chimney tops, much more interesting than the street view of the same buildings, and we had a great lunch without any sneering being had at all. Then Matt and I trotted around some more and went to the Charles de Gaulle art museum, and a few other places, eschewed the lines, and had a great time.

Really. This thing was so cool, and it just radiates attitude! It's some kind of three wheeled motorbike, but while most of these that you see in north America just look kind of dumb, this one is very very cool.

This icon doesn't even exist any longer, but Georgianne Olive has a picture of it. She was our very gracious hostess through our day and night tour of Athens, and is one of the most knowledgeable people in the universe about Athens, REM, the B-52s, and pretty much anything of Georgia and the Atlantic seaboard south. We had a wonderful time, thanks to her hospitality, and we learned a lot!

Well, we took pictures of everything we could find in Athens, including the outside of Michael Stipes' house, which is mostly bamboo everywhere. And we decided that the deepest homage was to pose with the ultimate Athens icon, the bulldog. They even inter them in the wall of the shrine-- that is to say, the football stadium.

The pilgrimage... REM fans will get the reference. What they may not know is that Weaver D's is purely the finest Southern cuisine south of Chapel Hill. The whole story is probably on Wikipedia-- no, actually, it's not. That's too bad, it's a good story. You can find it here instead: http://www.dixiedining.com/feature/feature_042002.htm. Apparently one of the REM boys' favorite joints in Athens. Well worth the visit, although if you come after the lunch rush, you get whatever's leftover.

Just in case you wondered how rough we had it... when we arrived, Bud and Liz were on the deck, wine glasses in hand, toasting our arrival. Very very very civilized. We had s'mores the last night, courtesy of the fire pit at the side of each of the chalets....

And just for the record-- it really was a not-crowded place. The Easter bunny, who had clearly been brought in to tend to the hordes of small easter-egg hunting children they'd hoped for, was a bit disconsolate.... he was more than happy to have his picture taken waving at a herd of slightly obnoxious Sales/Magorians...

Nancy, Renee, Dorothy, Mark, in that order. I had bronchitis, first time in my life, and hopefully the last. I wheezed my way up and down stairs, hills, and coughed my guts out during the night. I was not in the best shape I've ever been in, to put it mildly. However, stubbornly, I wasn't about to waste time in a doctor's office, much less an urgent care center, so I just toughed it out, and eventually, it got better. But I wouldn't recommend it as a way to spend a birthday.

This post is out of sequence, but in February 2008, we went down to to Twisp, WA, to stay with Matt's dad, Harry, while his brother and sister-in-law went to the state wrestling tournament (an annual pilgrimage). On the way there, we stayed at our favorite stopping off point, the Hillcrest Resort, for the night. They're very pet friendly, and tolerate our three dogs, at least as long as the beagle doesn't start screaming for attention... which has only happened once. He really, really had to go. Matt decided that this was a good night to document his rocknroll persona, so we had a photo-shoot...